The 40,000-square-foot Naylor Building for Upper School science, technology, engineering, and math opened in the fall of 2013 and features state-of-the-art classrooms and labs. Named for benefactor Irv Naylor ’54 and his family, the open and airy three-story building, which anchors the west side of the Campus Green, was purposefully designed for students to achieve their fullest potential.
Science and math faculty who came from Allan Building welcomed their spacious new classrooms and labs which provided new ways to approach their subject areas. “We were coming out of a building built in 1929. And because we don’t know how science will be taught 20 years from now, we wanted the new space to be adaptable and flexible,” said longtime Science Department Chair Andy Motsko at the time of the building’s opening.
He also noted that mobile instructor tables that can be wheeled to the side when they are not needed give faculty greater physical proximity to the students. “Being able to change the dynamic of the room means a lot. Little things like that can be big things,” Motsko added.
Beyond the classrooms, students are at home in the rooms and niches designed for study and quiet conversation. Small tables tucked in the corners of the first- and second-floor lobbies are rarely empty. But it is the two-story Foucault pendulum, the signature element of the Naylor Building that generates the most conversation. While it demonstrates a basic physics principle: the rotation of the earth, it has become a soothing space for a single student or a whole class to gather and watch the convex ball as it glides back and forth.
